techcrunch

I was a guest on the Gillmor Gang last Friday hosted by Steve Gillmor and available for streaming on Tech Crunch here. If you’ve never had the pleasure, it’s an hour of discussion at the nexus of technology, business, and current events and well worth seeing.

For the last few weeks we’ve devoted time to how we all should react to the revelations about Russian intelligence services attacking Facebook during the presidential election. The conversation has evolved over that time, in part because there are new revelations every week and as the plot thickens our response has become more nuanced.

For instance, when we started the discussion we knew that Facebook had been the advertising medium of choice for the Russians but that turned out to be only part of the story. In the intervening weeks we learned about the role of Cambridge Analytica in stealing user profiles. Technically we’d have to say there was no theft and that at the time Facebook was running exactly as it intended. I don’t know anyone who sleeps well knowing this. But it adds layers to our discussion and recommendations.

Last week I advocated, as I had in some blogs on BeagleResearch.com that we’ve entered a time when we must seriously consider regulating Facebook and all social media and treat it all like a utility. You can read more here.

But back to the Gillmor Gang. There was a variety of opinion about what to do and to my surprise, regulating was not top of mind for anyone other than me. That’s okay though. The discussion was lively and exercised points that I had not considered. What do you think? Take a look.

Dreamforce hasn’t even happened yet and I am already wishing it was about double the time it’s set up for. I’m arriving in San Francisco on Monday, two days before Marc Benioff’s keynote kicks everything off and I am already running late.

As has become customary, many Salesforce partners are holding user group meetings just before Dreamforce to keep their customers’ expenses down and have maximum impact on them. This is an unintended by-product and benefit of being in the ecosystem. To that end I’m attending Subscribed, the user meeting of Zuora, which would be worth the trip all on its own.

I have no more time for meetings and some of those on the calendar are looking dicey. There are too many parties, dinners and coffees to possibly make all of them and there is a full calendar of really good keynotes and other meetings for analysts to attend sponsored by Salesforce. Give me two more days!

Salesforce will be briefing me under NDA about the big news that will come out of the show so I can’t help you with anything semi-official other than to direct you to a piece by Chris Kanaracus in NetworkWorld.

According to statements made by CEO Marc Benioff, at TechCrunch on Tuesday, we can look for important announcements about a new service that’s like Dropbox, an identity management system, more information on the company’s integration with Workday and the company’s new Marketing Cloud.

That sounds like a full plate but curiously it doesn’t seem like enough. Back in 2004, Benioff had a George W. Bush impersonator walk on stage and disrupt the proceedings with a short speech to “this Fundraiser, Thanks Marc.” But that was because Dreamforce was held on election day if you can believe it.

This year I don’t look for the same kind of stunts because this year there is too much information to get across. Consider my schedule for Thursday — Sales Cloud Keynote, Work.com Keynote, Service Cloud Keynote, Chatter Keynote, Platform Keynote, Data.com Keynote, Marketing Keynote, SMB Keynote. And that’s just the MORNING! You don’t have a keynote without making an announcement of some kind so that’s why I think Benioff’s remarks at TechCrunch were useful but they’re just a teaser.

We could easily have two more days of this because unlike other shows where I could totally miss some ERP or other sessions that are not in my wheelhouse, everything at Dreamforce is relevant and important to cover. So it might sound strange with Dreamforce still in the future but I already want more, maybe not more information but more time to absorb it.